Devon Rood Screens

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About

Years ago I visited all but one of the churches in Devon. An interesting (and surprising) experience, but in particular, the quality and variety of the Devon medieval rood screens really stood out. But having done some web searching, it shows that Devon rood screen figures are not well represented on the web. A shame. This website now provides a visual record of these figurative Devon screens.

The symbolism of some of these figures are sometimes unclear. We've largely gone with the Bond and Bede interpretations of this. But there are other possibilities.

Richard Knights

Extra pages

References

Roodscreens and Roodlofts : Vol 2 - Francis Bond and Dom Bede Camm - Pitman (1909)
Representations of Sibyls on rood screens - Audrey Baker - Trans. Devon Assoc. 136, 71-97 (2004)
The Stripping of the Altars - Eamon Duffy - Yale (2005)
English panel paintings 1400-1558 - Audrey Baker - Archetype (2011)
A Cloud of Witnessess - Diane Wilks - Azure (2011)
The Church in Devon - Nicholas Orme - Impress (2013)

Norfolk Church Screens - An Introduction - Allan Barton (2012)
East Anglian medieval church screens. A brief guide to their physical history - Lucy Wrapson - Hamilton Kerr Institude, Bulletin 4 (2013)

Medieval Rood screens, with special reference to Devon - Michael Aufrère Williams - PhD - Exeter (2008)
Medieval Devon Roodscreens from the Fourteenth century to the Present Day - Michael Aufrère Williams - TDH, 83, 1-13, (2014)
The Iconography of Medieval Devon Roodscreens - Michael Aufrère Williams - TDH, 84, 17-34, (2015)
Devon Roodscreens after the Reformation: Destruction and Survival - Michael Aufrère Williams - TDH, 87, 11-24, (2018)

Most images in this website have been processed as follows:

The colour saturation slightly increased.
Some image sharpening.
Resizing of the thumbnail images so as to align the smaller images into a common size for display purposes. Thus a little distortion in some thumbnail images. But no distortion in the full blown images.

All the figures in the church view are displayed in order from the North to the South side of the screen as viewed from the nave. They follow a numerical order. So figure 01 is the most northerly figure when looking at the screen from the nave ...

An example from part of the Alphington screen - left is north:

Devon Screens

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